Team:UNIK Copenhagen/The iGEM community

iGEM creates its own world and research community which emphasises sharing of knowledge and helping each other. Even though iGEM is a competition, the teams are in close contact with each other and try to promote their superior goal to communicate synthetic biology to the outside world.

In our case we attended a workshop hosted by the DTU team for all Danish teams in order to learn more about basic biochemical labwork. In addition, we are hosting an ethics workshop for the Danish teams to discuss ethics in relation to synthetic biology and our projects. Click here to read more about our workshop. These meetings are helpful to gain new contacts, learn something about lab techniques and are serving a social purpose which makes participating in iGEM unique. For teams which are not so close physically it is harder to meet and communication is basically over the internet. For example, we have helped the University of Virginia’s 2014 iGEM team filling in a survey about synthetic biology. This gives them the opportunity to collect data throughout the world with less effort while creating are more complete picture of the situation worldwide.